Historical LGBTQ's

     Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? (Mt. 7:5) or, sometimes you can't see the forest for the trees. Oddly enough, today's passage (below) reminds me of this other passage, especially when I think of the LGBTQ community. The assembled congregation of Jesus' community apparently had made their own judgments about who are capable of being chosen; who could retain the wisdom and knowledge of the Sacred scrolls. A carpenters son, the 'local boy' was not one of those to be chosen. 

   How often are we concerned with someone else's failings or worse, perceived failings, that we don't even think about our own, dismissing people in wholesale fashion? And again, perhaps worse still, we are convinced we have no faults at all. We are an arrogant lot sometimes. We really should be judging less, even if the prevailing opinion or doctrines of the day say someone is wrong or just cannot be right. 

     What am I getting at? The hysteria unleashed when someone announces that they are gay, transgender, bisexual. Welcome at home? the community? Still your friend or no? How many people see one aspect of a person so as to dismiss the rest of what they are or have to say or offer?  People are judged and dismissed.

     I thought I would simply Google a few people that history would be dramatically different and are lives poorer in so many ways had we dismissed them because of their sexuality. You of course can dismiss them now but the contributions of these 'local boys' , not unlike Jesus, will forever grace our lives.

     King David ( of the scriptural gay couple, Jonathan and David  - note: steamy! )
     Aristotle, Socrates and Plato
     Alexander the Great
     Julius Caesar
     Michelangelo
     Leonardo DaVinci 
     Shakespeare
     Walt Whitman
     George Bernard Shaw
     Alan Turing
     Ralph Waldo Emerson
     Eleanor Roosevelt
     
Fascinating list and this would be the cliff notes version. When you Google it, you'll see.
We have a rather proud and illustrious community.  How rich are our lives today because of the presence of a person who could have been so easily dismissed. 

     Our self righteousness and arrogance, our blind vision and judgmental ways are often, if not always at the root of our biggest sin - failure to love as Jesus taught us.  For those of us that claim to be Christian, this is a cruel and real indictment that we should take seriously. Even worse, those that claim Christianity and being gay, we should really be at the forefront of love, inclusiveness and judgment free living.

     

     

Matthew 13:53-58

When Jesus had finished these parables, he left that place.

He came to his home town and began to teach the people in their synagogue, so that they were astounded and said, ‘Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power? Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?’ And they took offence at him. But Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honour except in their own country and in their own house.’ And he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief.